In the course of creating our MazeFire Game collections, we have encountered a great many Digital Resources As these may benefit students, consumers and organizations, we provide here a sampling of resources that seem reasonably good in terms of: (1) potential value to some portion of our targeted audiences, (2) accessible, i.e. offering helpful content outside of subscription firewalls, and (3) ease-of-use, i.e. rapidly loading pages with minimal bandwidth consumption and ad clutter. These are sites that MazeFire particularly likes and we will continue to add resources, including those of our content partners. We will, of course, avoid or remove items that do not meet the academic standards to which we aspire. We will also work to quickly correct any maze content found in error (please ping us at contact@mazefire.com).

#1.General ResourcesWhile no information source is perfect (including the top academic journals), there are a multitude of resources that offer valuable information to students and scholars, if used with discretion. We list here some destinations that we found helpful as information sources and for corroborating factual elements of our games. Our Ed-Tech 101 Maze game offers a broader picture/quiz regarding the current state of education.

Wikipedia. While it might be considered bad form to cite Wikipedia on term papers (and worse form in actual publications), in terms of user experience Wikipedia is the gold standard and its content is every bit as good as much of the content found in many academic journals.

Google Scholar. Google, Bing and other search engines are the dominant information tools of our era, but Google Scholar is unique in organizing published articles (mostly from real journals) sorted using a relevance-impact algorithm. It quite helpfully points readers to articles that cite the items found in the search.

PubMed. In the life science and medical fields, PubMed is a more selective resource that lists articles published by qualified academic journals chronologically.

Google Image. It's nominally a general-information resource, but if you query with (e.g.) Neanderthal Genome, you'll find a wealth of information that you can peruse in image mode, a brain operational state that complements our more traditional text-scanning research mode. You can find many interesting niche resources with this approach.

Khan Academy. Created in 2006, Salman Khan's video lessons aim to provide a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere. Skyrocketing popularity, especially in the K12 space, led to support from the Gates Foundation and from Google (to translate lessons).

#2. Special Educational ResourcesThese resources have been of help in different aspects of our content creation efforts and/or are noteworthy for other reasons particular to the MazeFire mission.

Best History Sites
Highly recommended by BBC, NY Public Library and others, this site offers a wealth of hierarchical, easily navigated resources including paragraph-length descriptions making this an invaluable resource for teachers and anyone interested in history. Wikipedia's page titled History is another neat resource.

50 Great Serious Games
Rose Jensen, at OnlineColleges.net, provides links and useful snapshot of wide-ranging games, mostly for ages high school and up. Spanning business, nanotech, defense and Sandra Day O'Connor's courtroom journeys, this site has fun activities but some links fail.

Yale Teachable Tidbits
In conjunction with the National Academies Summer Institutes, the Yale Center for Scientific Teaching offers a nice collection of Teachable Tidbits, including active learning exercises. Dr. O'Malley is a National Academy Teaching Fellow for 2014-2015 academic year.

MEDscience
MEDscience, based out of Harvard Medical School, is an immersive premedical institute that offers an intensive, simulator-based curriculum for premedical students at Boston area high schools and serves as a model of applied medical sciences/STEM learning.

Meridian Academy
Meridian Academy is a project-based, interdisciplinary secondary school in Boston for students who want to become experienced problem-solvers with leadership skills and carry out original projects, while making connections between academic concepts and the real world.

MOOC List
Want to know more about Genetics and Evolution? Or Huckleberry Finn and The Great Poems? You might find MOOC List helpful. They provide a rolling list of courses upcoming in the next 30 days and I was able to link thru to a Dino101 MOOC by Coursera.

Orion Business Solutions
If you wish to launch an Ed-Tech enterprise, Orion provides the total package, from Web Design to expert development practices to market launch. Creators of MazeFire 2.0 and other novel web deployments, you can contact Orion at info@orionbs.com.

Coursera Contact Info
Coursera and EdX are two major MOOC providers. If you need to contact Coursera about any of their courses, technical issues or using MOOCs in your instruction, this page provides some email addresses. My initial registration failed, but I do have an open trouble ticket.

Free Textbooks via OpenStax
Open Stax, in collaboration with Rice University and many contributors, offers free, peer-reviewed Digital Textbooks. Their Biology text seems nice, with tons of useful info, and the Physiology download was most helpful (as I was in a pinch). Nice video links too.

Peer-to-Peer University
This grass roots, open-education project offers MOOCs, badges, lab reports and other tools for lifelong learning. You will find here schools of Education, Webcraft and Data. You can create your own courses and can both earn and create badges.

Subscription Request

MazeFire LLC was founded by Donald M. O'Malley, researcher in Biological Intelligence at Northeastern University,
and Brian Griffiths, a neural epigenetics researcher at UMass Boston. MazeFire 2.0 was designed and created by
Orion Business Solutions LLC.
We hope our expanding collection of free, educational click-and-play games will spark frequent review and deeper learning
for teachers, publishers, Ed-Tech innovators, students and kids of all ages.